In an eleventh-hour intervention, former supporter of the Dutch Euthanasia laws and member of the Euthanasia Review Committee in The Netherlands, Professor Theo Boer tells Britain that he was wrong. This article from the UK Daily Mail:

Euthanasia is now becoming so prevalent in the Netherlands, Professor Boer said, that it is ‘on the way to becoming a default mode of dying for cancer patients’.

He said assisted deaths have increased by about 15 per cent every year since 2008 and the number could hit a record 6,000 this year.

He said he was concerned at the extension of killing to new classes of people, including the demented and the depressed, and the establishment of mobile death units of ‘travelling euthanasing doctors’.

Activists, Professor Boer said, continue to campaign for doctor-administered death to be made ever easier and ‘will not rest’ until a lethal pill is made available to anyone over 70 who wishes to die.‘Some slopes truly are slippery,’ he added.

The Utrecht University academic has been a member since 2005 of a review committee charged with monitoring euthanasia deaths. Its role includes a duty to ‘tell doctors how their actions in particular cases are likely to stand up to legal, medical and ethical scrutiny’.

Professor Boer admitted he was ‘wrong – terribly wrong, in fact’ to have believed regulated euthanasia would work.

‘I used to be a supporter of the Dutch law. But now, with 12 years of experience, I take a very different view.

Whereas in the first years after 2002 hardly any patients with psychiatric illnesses or dementia appear in reports, these numbers are now sharply on the rise.

‘Cases have been reported in which a large part of the suffering of those given euthanasia or assisted suicide consisted in being aged, lonely or bereaved.

‘Some of these patients could have lived for years or decades. Pressure on doctors to conform to patients’ – or in some cases relatives’ – wishes can be intense.

‘Pressure from relatives, in combination with a patient’s concern for their wellbeing, is in some cases an important factor behind a euthanasia request. Not even the review committees, despite hard and conscientious work, have been able to halt these developments.’

The latest euthanasia figures for the Netherlands show that nearly one in seven deaths are at the hands of doctors.

In 2012, there were 4,188 deaths by direct euthanasia – 3 per cent of all deaths – and 3,695 deaths by direct euthanasia in 2011.

The figures do not include deaths by terminal sedation, where patients are rendered unconscious before they are dehydrated and starved to death, an act often referred to as ‘euthanasia by omission’.

This practice accounts for more than 12 per cent of all deaths in the country.

The Netherlands is following a pattern that anti-euthanasia campaigners say has happened wherever the practice has been legalised.

Doctors in neighbouring Belgium are collectively killing an average of five people every day by euthanasia – with a 27 per cent surge in one year.

Dignity in Dying, the pressure group which supports Lord Falconer’s bill, dismissed fears that the legislation might lead to similar horrors.

Its spokesman James Harris said: ‘Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill will not legalise euthanasia, rather assisted dying for adults who are terminally ill and mentally competent, similar to legislation in Oregon which has been working safely for over 17 years and has never been extended beyond the criteria of terminal illness.’

Anti-euthanasia campaigners dispute that the Oregon law is safe or that limited numbers are dying at their own request.

Elspeth Chowdharay-Best, honorary secretary of Alert, the anti-euthanasia pressure group, said legalising assisted suicide would be like ‘stepping off a precipice’. ‘It means that you would lose the right to live,’ she said. ‘It is more serious than people realise.’

Under Lord Falconer’s bill, a terminally-ill patient would be able to ask for drugs to kill him or herself.

Two doctors would need to approve, and to be satisfied the patient was of sound mind and settled view, and had not been influenced by others.